Saturday Open Thread [10.10.2015]

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY–Fairleigh Dickinson: Trump 26, Carson 22, Rubio 8, Bush 7, Fiorina 7, Huckabee 6, Cruz 5

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY–Fairleigh Dickinson: Clinton 45, Sanders 23, Biden 17

NEW HAMPSHIRE–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY–Gravis: Trump 32, Carson 13, Kasich 10, Fiorina 8, Bush 8, Rubio 8, Cruz 5, Christie 3, Paul 2, Graham 1, Huckabee 1, Santorum 1, Jindal 0, Pataki 0

NEW HAMPSHIRE–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY–Gravis: Sanders 33, Clinton 30, Biden 11, O’Malley 2, Webb 1, Chafee 1

Jonathan Chait says Republicans need Paul Ryan as their next speaker:

What actually separates the insurgents from the Establishment is not ideology but tactics. The insurgents refuse to accept the constitutional limits of their power, and believe that more frenzied assertions of their core beliefs, combined with a periodic willingness to shut down the government and threaten a currency default, can prevail over President Obama through force of will. The insurgents mistakenly interpret disagreements over means as disagreements over ends; when Republican leaders express reluctance to shut down the government over Obamacare or Planned Parenthood, the insurgents take this as actual support for those programs.

What makes Ryan so perfectly suited to bridge this divide is that he perfectly combines ideological extremism with methodological pragmatism.

So Ryan’s ideological bona fides are so strong that he and only he can convince restive and angry conservatives to delay ideological gratification until that 2017 when Republicans control the federal government and can descend America into the horror that comes from Republican policies. But Ryan still says no. LOL.

Mickey Hirten at the City Pulse touches on something about Bernie Sanders that I have long suspected: he is the representation of the scolding purist faction of the progressive movement, rather than of the pragmatic bridge-building-making progress faction of the progressive movement.

Here’s my problem with Bernie Sanders. With few exceptions, I agree with his positions on issues. But I don’t like him or his political temperament. He’d be an awful president. I followed him carefully when I was editor of the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. Sanders was the state’s sole congressman, lived in Burlington, and would periodically visit with the newspaper’s editors and publisher.

Considering that the Free Press’ editorial positions were very liberal, reflecting the nature of a very liberal Vermont community, one might think that meetings with Sanders were cordial, even celebratory. They weren’t. Sanders was always full of himself: pious, self-righteous and utterly humorless. Burdened by the cross of his socialist crusade, he was a scold whose counter-culture moralizing appealed to the state’s liberal sensibilities as well as its conservatives, who embraced his gun ownership stance, his defense of individual rights, an antipathy toward big corporations and, generally speaking, his stick-it-to-them approach to politics. […]

I’m not alone in my opinions about Sanders. Chris Graf, long-time Associated Press bureau chief in Vermont, in an article published Sept. 30 in Theweek.com, had this to say about the senator. “Bernie has no social skills, no sense of humor, and he’s quick to boil over. He’s the most unpolitical person in politics I’ve ever come across,” Graf said. Others who have covered Sanders agree.[…]

Which is too bad, because Sanders’ positions are really good, progressive and would help Americans. He’d just be really bad advancing them.

Yeah, this all sounds like an ad hominem, and it probably is. But this aspect of personality is of importance when considering who would be a good President. And hell, if Sanders supporters can attack Hillary’s integrity at will, then Sanders’ temperament is fair game.

Steve Benen begins to agree with me that Ted Cruz will be the 2016 Republican nominee.

The Texas Republican has considerable resources, a real ground game, a credible reputation as an enemy of the GOP establishment, and decent poll numbers that are likely to grow if fickle voters grow tired of the Amateur Trio. Indeed, the senator has carefully positioned himself to benefit from his rivals’ eventual decline.

Why shouldn’t Cruz be seen as a plausible nominee?

Postscript: For the record, Cruz huddled with House Republicans on Wednesday night, a development I suggested seemed likely to lead to intra-party mischief. A day later, House Republicans descended into chaos, unable to elect their own Speaker, prompting Cruz to take a victory lap.

Chris Cillizza: “There is a revolution happening within the Republican party right now. The establishment’s hold on power is more tenuous than it has been at any time in recent memory. There is no one currently in office that can claim with any credibility that he or she speaks “for” the party as a whole.”

“That’s a remarkable development since, for decades, the GOP was known as the party that, eventually, got in line… No longer. McCarthy’s demise comes hard on the heels of Boehner bowing out of the speakership as a sort of human sacrifice to the tea party right. And it happens as Donald Trump is in the midst of his fourth consecutive month as the Republican front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination — and with Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, two other people who have never held elected office before, running in second and third place, respectively.”

“The increasing hostility of the Republicans to the Fed and to me personally troubled me, particularly since I had been appointed by a Republican president who had supported our actions during the crisis. I tried to listen carefully and accept thoughtful criticisms. But it seemed to me that the crisis had helped to radicalize large parts of the Republican Party.”

— Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, in his new book, The Courage to Act, on leaving the Republican party.

Matt Lewis: “The GOP’s presidential primary race legitimately risks nominating Donald Trump and descending into a parody. And now the Republican-controlled Congress is in total chaos. No one wants to be Speaker… All of this comes with the backdrop of a coming debt ceiling deadline in November that comes before another big budget vote in December.”

“What a mess. Could Republicans have imagined a more nightmarish series of political events a year out from a presidential election? Sadly, I doubt it.”

Bryce Covert takes issue with Jeb Bush’s comments that Democrats use “free stuff” to win voters and points out that there’s “a whole treasure trove of government handouts that aren’t dispensed through spending, but rather through the tax code.”

“So while low-income Americans are more likely to get health insurance through Medicaid, well-off Americans are the ones who reap the benefit of health insurance tax breaks. Poor families might be able to get Section 8 apartment vouchers or spots in public housing, but the mortgage interest deduction overwhelmingly helps people who make more than $100,000 a year buy their homes.”

“What the government loses to tax expenditures dwarfs spending on welfare programs. Each year, it spends about $17 billion on assistance to needy families and more than $70 billion on food stamps, compared with more than $900 billion that flows out through the tax code. It expends nearly three times as much on tax subsidies for homeowners as it does for rental assistance for the poor.”

Marin Cogan: “Nobody sane wants this job, and who can blame them? The party has splintered and is completely at odds with itself. They can’t govern; they can’t even keep it together in the cloakroom. It’s the surest confirmation yet of what we are seeing reflected in the presidential nominating contest. No one is running the Republican Party. It’s a movement totally devoid of leadership. What that means for the party’s future, no one seems to know — but if I were a Republican who cared about the party, I would be deeply worried for it.”

Paul Waldman:

Many Republicans are looking at what’s happening in the House of Representatives right now with something between consternation and horror. The party is tearing itself apart, unable to pick a leader for one of its key institutional bases of power and riven by disagreements that seem unbridgeable.
But you want to know who isn’t upset about all this? The ultra-conservative members who are driving it, not to mention the conservative organizations and media figures who are cheering them on. They’re having a blast.

The most important thing to understand about what’s happening now is that this is a permanent rebellion. It has its demands, both substantive and procedural, but those demands aren’t the point, and if they were met, new ones would be forthcoming. For the people behind the chaos, rebellion itself is the point. It’s about the fight, not about the outcome of that fight. They will never stop rebelling.